


What Pandora Never Lost

by luckybarton



Category: Altered Carbon (TV 2018), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Depressing, Ficlet, Gen, Short One Shot, Sorry Not Sorry, but so is the canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 09:19:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13567527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luckybarton/pseuds/luckybarton
Summary: After all these years, Logan is still alive.





	What Pandora Never Lost

It’s not like he hasn’t died before, himself, but Logan can’t get used to this world. Oh, they all wanted to recruit him, back before they realised that the adamantium coating over his vertebra and the healing factor made it impossible to stick a disk up his back, to make him immortal in their sense of the word. But that’s behind him. What he does now is his business.

There are no new mutants, but these days? Everyone’s a freak, and not in the way he likes. He wonders what it would be like to bring back Charles. Whether it would even be possible to encode his mind in digital format. Whether another’s brain could hold him. He wonders what Laura is doing, if she’s still out there. Still alive. He knows Cap is, somewhere. Fighting the good fight. He can’t remember the last time Wolverine was considered a good guy, or a guy at all.

Being a myth is fine.

So he goes to the galleries. Looks at the exhibitions. Looks at the light they paint the past in and wonders if he could stand in it, go back to a time that never was and be on the side that won. There used to be things of this sort about mutants, back when the Smithsonian was still around, hadn’t been co-opted by smog, neon lights, and a tower block. But the people here don’t talk about heroes, because their lives are what they are, and nobody needs saving anymore, anyway. 

People back then were hopeful, but the last generations have never known hope. He wonders who lost it first: maybe the interstellar travelers, maybe their kids, he doesn’t know. But at some point, like the X-Gene, it stopped being passed on.

He doesn't know what kind of person you'd have to be, to still feel purpose.


End file.
